International aid has become more important to the donors than the recipients

Congratulations to Rahul Bedi for putting into wordswhat we all half-suspected: India neither needs nor wants UK aid. Such grants are outdated and patronising, he says, and encourage corruption. Indeed, Indians have 'become so contemptuous of Britain’s contribution that they accept it merely to avoid causing the Coalition embarrassment'. Ouch! Indians are a courteous people and Mr Bedi is perhaps too discreet to play his trump card: India's economic prospects are healthier than Britain's (see here). So why on Earth are we still ponying up?

In one of his wartime radio broadcasts, CS Lewis warned against making charitable donations for your sake rather than the recipient's. It's not enough to stuff your note into the outstretched hat and then stroll on complacently; you also need to be reasonably sure the money will do more good than harm. When politicians say that they support development aid 'to show what kind of a nation we are', they are not being high-minded, but lazy. The purpose of alms-giving ought to be to the alleviation of suffering. Anything else is a form of self-righteousness.

International assistance of the wrong sort can be actively harmful: it can retard enterprise, trap people in dependency and – because it breaks the link between taxation and revenue – prop up rotten regimes. As my Nigerian friend Thompson Ayodele never tires of pointing out, countries which don't receive aid invariably outperform countries that do.

Of course, development is big business. Several para-statal actors now depend upon government aid budgets for their incomes. These mega-charities can become downright shirty when they are told to spend taxpayers' money on the destitute rather than on their own lobbying efforts. Governments, terrified of being accused of heartlessness, often allow themselves to be bullied.

Still, it's worth standing back and considering the big picture. We are borrowing money we don't have to send it to a country less indebted than our own. That country doesn't want it, but accepts it as a favour to us. The money encourages corruption without reducing poverty. Our relations are damaged in consequence.

This last point is critical, for the twenty-first century will turn on the question of whether India sees itself primarily as an Asian power or as an Anglosphere democracy. David Cameron, to his huge credit, grasps the importance of Britain's relationship with India. Despite our demographic connections, our ties of language and law, we export remarkably little there. Ours could be a powerful and benign alliance, but not if we smugly write welfare cheques while simultaneously asking India to bail out the euro.

Incidentally, there is a flip-side to the CS Lewis argument. Just as some Leftists are wrong to elevate motive over outcome, to see aid as an advertisement of virtue rather than a way to effect practical results, so some Rightists make the converse error of believing that, since the whole thing is hopeless, there is no point in bothering. In fact, there are practical ways to tackle poverty. Not every charity is a lobbyistof the Oxfam/Christian Aid type. This one, for example, makes every effort to spend money on those in need rather than on itself. And there are plenty of steps that Western governments, too, could take. Indeed, the single action that would most help developing countries wouldn't cost a penny: they could scrap the CAP.